News

Stanford was swimming with high school students who competed in the Sea Lion Bowl, a challenging ocean sciences quiz event. The School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences hosted the regional competition.

New research by Jonathan Payne's lab refutes a hypothesis by the famed evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould that marine creatures underwent an “early burst” of functional diversity during the dawn of animal life.

In California, dry years coupled with warm conditions are more likely to lead to severe drought than dry, cool years, and the probability of warm and dry conditions coinciding is likely to increase under anthropogenic climate change.

Kate Maher and a team of scientists at Stanford and Vanderbilt Universities have created the first comprehensive map of the topsy-turvy climate of the western U.S. and are using it to test and improve the ability of global climate models to predict future precipitation patterns.

Two-thirds of high seas fisheries are depleted or overfished, with impacts of climate change and marine pollution compounding the problem. Technology and political will can reverse the downward trend and move toward sustainability.

New research by a Stanford team shows that climate change is expanding the amount of U.S. agricultural land that is suitable for harvesting two crops per growing season, a system known as double cropping. The practice offers higher productivity and more income for American farmers, but future yield losses from climate change may still outstrip the gains from double cropping.

The new name – the Stanford School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences – reflects the school’s focus on understanding the workings of the planet and helping address resource and environmental challenges facing the world.

A new study by Roz Naylor and postdoctoral scholar Ling Cao offers the clearest picture to date of China’s enormous impact on wild fisheries. The study also presents a more sustainable alternative to the current practice of using wild-caught fish to feed farm-raised fish.

The fault responsible for the 9.0 magnitude Tohoku earthquake had been relieving stress at a gradually accelerating rate for years before the 2011 quake, according to findings from Prof. Paul Segall's research group.

Adam Brandt received a sustainable energy award to conduct an economic assessment on energy systems that use multiple feedstocks. The award was one of eight seed grants totaling about $1.5 million distributed by Stanford's Precourt Institute, Precourt Energy Efficiency Center and TomKat Center.

Daniel Swain says the upcoming rainstorms this week – among the largest in recent years – will provide a short-term respite to California's drought, by far the state's most intense drought in the historical record. The rain will be good for ecosystems, salmon runs and reservoirs.

Sensory Earth tells multimedia stories about how geoscientists use advanced technologies in creative ways to improve our sensory perceptions. From stunning radar images to sounds of screaming volcanoes, we learn more about the planet when more of our senses are engaged. Come explore our strange and wonderful world.

Jenny Suckale is endlessly fascinated by the Navier-Stokes equation, which she uses to study everything from volcanic eruptions to Antarctic ice flow. The story of how Suckale came to discover and love the Earth Sciences is as nonlinear as some of the natural phenomena she studies.

The best way to learn science is to actually do it. Students in the School of Earth Science's Wrigley Field Program in Hawaii spend the quarter measuring vegetation, coral reefs and volcanoes to understand the dynamics of one of the planet's most interesting ecosystems.

Earth Systems sophomores Emma Hutchinson and Mary Cirino researched Earth's climate, from the strongest wind system on Earth to the tropical Pacific, as part of the Stanford School of Earth Sciences Summer Undergraduate Research (SESUR) program.

A pioneer in the analysis of global land use change, Lambin employs advanced data collection and satellite imagery to understand human decision making and its influence on ecosystems and global environmental change.